


Restless Magic (Midas Touch Mix)

by thescrewtapedemos



Category: Electronic Dance Music RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Cursebreaking, Curses, M/M, Magical Realism, and analogies to terminal illness, possible trigger for discussing long term illness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-19
Updated: 2017-06-16
Packaged: 2018-11-02 11:20:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10943466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thescrewtapedemos/pseuds/thescrewtapedemos
Summary: “My guts are worth a billion dollars,” he tells Porter as soon as the call picks up and Porter snorts, undignified and echoing loudly through the speakers.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> black sun by death cab for cutie is required listening for this chapter. kintsugi, get it?? sort of mostly inspired by the prompt title 'restless magic'. sort of also a happy birthday for @leclercq! happy birthday ize, i hope this lines up enough for ya. 
> 
> enjoy! xoxo

“It seems that your organs are transmuting,” the doctor says and, well. 

Well. 

“Into what?” Mat asks, not because it’s actually relevant. Mat can’t do anything about something like this. He’s just kind of curious. 

He’d come in hoping he didn’t have, like, cancer or appendicitis. WebMD had been unclear on what ‘vague abdominal ache, bodily heaviness, lethargy’ could mean, other than every kind of cancer. 

“Gold, I believe,” the doctor says. He has a grandfatherly face and his hands had been warm through the gloves when they’d pressed on Mat’s abdomen, gentle pressure against his stomach and then his back. The diagnostic spells he’d cast hadn’t hurt much either, a soft wash of cool antiseptic sensation and then a slightly minty aftertaste rising from the back of Mat’s tongue. “It looks like a powerful spell. I have some cursebreakers I can recommend, if you don’t have a family practitioner already.” 

“Oh,” Mat says, because, yeah. “Yeah. Please, yes, thanks.”

\--

“My guts are worth a billion dollars,” he tells Porter as soon as the call picks up and Porter snorts, undignified and echoing loudly through the speakers. He sounds like he’s somewhere busy, a cafe or a restaurant of some kind. Someone’s calling out names and order numbers in the background.

Mat idly wonders where Porter is. He could find out, or ask, but he just doesn’t care. His insides are turning slowly but surely into pure golden replicas of themselves. 

It had started with the abdominal wall at least, and not the heart or lungs. A cell here or there, little patches. The largest is about half the size of Mat’s pinky nail. The doctor had conjured a little picture of it, a cartoonish diagram of an illusion, gold gleaming in the coldness of fluorescent strip-lighting. 

It’s spreading, an exponential rate of expansion. He’s going to starve to death in a month, the doctor had said, his organs slowly losing their ability to function. And that’s if it doesn’t spread to his heart first, or somehow migrate to his brain. 

“What are you talking about?” Porter asks and Mat knuckles at his mouth for a moment. 

He feels kind of distant from himself. The news isn’t quite sinking in. 

“Someone cursed my body to turn into gold or some shit,” he gets out through his teeth and Porter is silent. 

“Jesus,” he breathes at last, crackling harsh through the shitty connection. 

He sounds… he sounds _scared_. Mat pushes it away, swallows down the rising flood of- 

He doesn’t know what it is, only knows he doesn’t have time for it. It’s bad enough that Porter is miles away, maybe a whole world away, gone somewhere he can’t reach Mat to hold his wrists and force him to breathe and make him eat something tonight. 

“You’re seeing a cursebreaker, right?” he’s demanding a moment later, voice tumbling out of him terse and terrified. There’s the noise of a door opening and then the white noise of the crowd fades into the white noise of a different crowd. A street, probably. “Mat, fuck.” 

“Yeah,” he mumbles belatedly and toes at the dusty cement. The alley he’s hiding in smells kind of nice, as far as alleys go. The scatter of old cigarette butts is thin and it looks like someone’s scrubbed the graffiti off recently. He focuses on that and not on the ache inside him that he wants to think he’s imagining. “Doctor gave me some numbers, I called a few.” 

It’s silent for a moment. Mat listens to Porter’s breathing, the echoing shouts from the background at the other end of the line. 

He’s quit smoking something like a million times already but he’d kind of expected the news to be bad and he hid a pack in his back pocket for just this occasion. Porter doesn’t comment when he hears the lighter clicking in Mat’s hand. 

His lungs feel like they open with the first drag and it’s all a chemical illusion but he’ll take that. 

“What are you going to do?” Porter asks at last and sometimes Mat forgets how young he really is. In the whirlwind of their lives, of the industry and the touring and how adult Porter seems when he gets music between his teeth and takes off running, it’s so easy to forget. 

He can’t forget when Porter sounds like this. 

“Don’t know,” he answers honestly and takes another drag. “Try and break the curse, I guess.”

\--

The cursebreaker Mat ends up finalizing an appointment with has an office in a little outlying suburb, far enough from downtown to feel suburban but close enough Mat hasn’t settled into his nerves by the time he pulls up. He tells himself it’s for the best and pulls the papers his doctor had handed him from the passenger seat.

He doesn’t really understand all the abbreviations or the medical jargon, the weirdly formatted charts. His body and medical history laid out in a few terse letters and numbers. _Transmutation - Metal/Metallic Alloy (Gold, Au)_. 

He understands that part. 

The sun is blazing down around him as he steps out of the car. It’s a sticky summer day, humid and thick around him. Moving through it is walking through honey and he swims through the heat waver to the door of the little building that houses the cursebreaker’s office. 

Francis, PhD. 

There’s no receptionist in the suite labeled with Francis’s name, only a little sitting area and a door with a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on a cheerful chalkboard. A little water cooler in one corner and a table with a pile of magazines in another. 

It reminds Mat of therapy. It’s not the most comfortable association. 

The door opens before the nerves can wash in over him. 

He’d been expecting something else. 

Someone else, someone like his doctor had been. Someone old and grandfatherly. Not this, a well-groomed beard and a smile that’s more mischief than trustworthiness. He has tattoos peeking out of the sleeves rolled up above his wrists. He’s taller than Mat but not by too much, broader than him too but still not by enough to be intimidating. 

Mat blinks at him. 

“Are you _old_ enough to have a PhD?” Mat demands. The man - Francis, this must be… Dr. Francis? Mat boggles - raises his eyebrows. 

“You’re Matan?” he asks easily. A Californian accent. South Cali, Mat judges dizzily. 

“Mat,” he corrects, the word automatic. Francis smiles wider, eyes crinkling at the corner. 

“I’m older than you,” he replies easily and steps further into the room. “Wanna see my degrees? Check if they’re legit?” 

Mat swallows down the _yes, actually_ and stumbles forward a step, sticks out an awkward hand. 

“Mat Zohar,” he introduces himself unnecessarily. “Can you, uh… save my life or whatever?” 

Francis’s smile doesn’t flicker. He takes Mat’s hand and shakes it firmly and his gaze is warm and impersonal. It is, in its own way, comforting. 

“Call me Dillon,” he replies. “I’ll see what I can do.”

\--

Dillon’s office is a little less _therapist_ than the waiting area, a couple posters for old bands on the walls and a bookshelf full of knick-knacks instead of books. A desk against the wall scattered in papers and a laptop, open but asleep. There’s a record player too, and a stack of records Mat resists the urge to reach for.

His hands are itching with the urge to _do_. He’s uncomfortable, uneasy in this space despite himself. He wants it to be easy. He knows it’s not going to be. 

“Take a seat if you want,” Dillon says and settles easily into an armchair. Mat’s paperwork is in his hands but he hasn’t looked at it, watches Mat dither for a moment in the middle of the floor for a moment instead and then settle gingerly onto the couch. 

He’s looking down at the papers when Mat finally gets himself settled. Flipping through them idly, pausing for a moment here and there. Mat wonders what he’s seeing in the pages. 

“It says you’ve got a non-standard transmutation curse,” Dillon says and Mat shrugs in answer. He doesn’t know anything Dillon can’t read on the papers in his hands. “Run me through your symptoms? And if you don’t mind me running a few diagnostics and shit, standard doctor stuff.” 

“Yeah,” Mat shakes himself and tries to pull his thoughts together. “Uh, just like... Pain in my abdomen, in my muscles? And my body feeling heavier? And uh, I’m tired a lot. I don’t know. I didn’t think it would be a curse.” 

He doesn’t mention he’d kind of just thought it was more of the same, more of that same shitty dragging depression he’s been fighting through for months. He barely notices the familiar wash of antiseptic magic, the taste of mint. The cool _otherness_ left to linger in his tissues until his heartbeat finally washes it away. Dillon pauses for a moment, unfocused, before nodding. 

“He was right about the curse,” he says and leans over to set the stack of Mat’s paper on his desk. His expression is more serious when he turns back to Mat. 

“It might help if you knew who cursed you,” he says gently. His expression is practiced and nonjudgemental but his eyes are fixed on Mat’s face. “It’d be easier to break. You could go to the police, curses are seriously fucking illegal.” 

Mat swallows. Swallows again, and tries not to pay attention to the pressure he can feel swelling behind his eyes. He’s not going to _cry_ , not here and not now in front of this strange SoCal weirdo of a cursebreaker. 

“I don’t know,” he says and his voice comes out weird but at least it doesn’t sound like he’s about to cry. “I just… Yeah, I have no idea who’d want to curse me.” 

Dillon sits back in his chair and tilts his head. 

“No one you’ve pissed off recently?” he asks and Mat huffs out a laugh, shrugs. 

“I piss off everybody,” he says and gestures vaguely at the shape of his phone in his pocket. “Check my Twitter feed or whatever.” 

Dillon’s eyebrow goes up again but the smile on his face seems pretty real. 

“Badly enough to get a curse laid on you?” he asks shrewdly. “They’re gonna need something like hair or blood to anchor this kind of shit, it couldn’t be just a fan.” 

“Yeah,” Mat says. His hands feel useless suddenly and he clasps them together for something to do. “No, I don’t think so.” 

“Ex-girlfriend?” Dillon asks and Mat snorts before he can stop himself and then freezes. 

He’s not exactly famous. Not famous enough for it to matter for too long if he comes out, just a few months of awkward interviews and not being able to look at his Twitter mentions. Not that he wants to come out. He’s never wanted to, never wanted his life in the open like that. But it isn’t just about him. Isn’t just his life that it would affect. 

He thinks of Porter and bites the inside of his cheek and stares at the realization dawning in Dillon’s gaze. 

“Ex-boyfriends?” he asks at last, tone careful, and Mat breathes out. 

“He wouldn’t,” he replies. He feels… tired. He always feels tired when he thinks about Porter. “Just… yeah, trust me. He wouldn’t.” 

“You’re sure?” Dillon asks. He’s still so careful. His eyes are kind when Mat glances at them and away again. 

“Yeah. You, uh. You can’t say anything, okay? It’s not a big deal, but-,” he starts. Dillon interrupts him with a laugh, a wave of a hand. 

“Dude, haven’t you heard of like, doctor-patient confidentiality?” he asks, breezy. “I’m not gonna ask who he is. You’re good. Don’t have an aneurysm.”

Mat glares but there’s no real heat in it. Nothing but relief. Porter’s safe, for now, with this man. 

“Alright,” Dillon says after an awkward beat. “I can break this shit without knowing who laid the curse, it’ll just be a little more difficult. I’m a professional.” 

Mat snorts again, on purpose this time. Dillon grins back, unrepentant. 

“How long?” he asks. 

“We’re gonna get to know each other,” Dillon says and shrugs easily but the smile is gone from his face. He looks a little sad, suddenly. “It’s going to take a while to break this curse, dude. It’s really strong.” 

“How long is a while?” Mat asks but his tongue is numb with the surge of... he thinks it’s fear. Fear and resignation. He doesn’t have long. A month. A month before his organs calcify into gold and begin to shut down. 

He wonders abruptly if the curse will continue to act on his corpse. If he’d be a golden statue of rot and bones or a pile of corpse-dust, perfectly preserved golden organs nestled inside. He could probably ask Dillon. He might know. 

“A week or two, maybe three,” Dillon says and the smile emerges again, reassuring. Mat stares at it. “I’m prioritizing you, it’s a really nasty curse. Meetings three times a week?” 

“Okay,” Mat says faintly and then shakes himself, sits up straighter. He’s going to have to cancel a show, maybe two. Cancel some studio time. The alternative is dying. “Yeah, okay, yes. I can do that.” 

“Awesome!” Dillon says and puts his fist in the air triumphantly. “We’re gonna get this curse out of you, promise.”

\--

Mat wakes with a jolt and he’s reaching for his phone before he registers the time, the orange pool of the streetlight outside his window. It’s late and he’d been dreaming and the fear is drying to his skin with the sweat, sticky and disgusting.

He can feel the weight inside him, dragging him down and down to the floor. 

Porter doesn’t pick up for long enough for Mat to wake up a little, to register that wherever in the world he is Porter might be busy. That maybe he shouldn’t have called. Porter’s picking up before he can follow that thought, before he can end the call. 

The other end is quiet, not the quiet of an empty room but the silence of a quiet night. The sound of evening, of sleeping. He’d woken Porter, which means they’re probably pretty close geographically speaking. 

He swallows down the desire to say _where are you, I need to come over_. He hasn’t felt it in a while, not like this, not this strongly. 

“Mat?” Porter asks, sleepy and hoarse and waking up by the moment. “What’s up, you okay?” 

Mat hauls in a breath. His lungs feel kind of thick. 

“Yeah,” he mumbles. “Yeah, no. Yeah, sorry.” 

The silence stretches on and on. Mat thinks of cells dividing inside him, of the little ways his body is expanding and contracting. Thinks of himself freezing slowly, from the inside out, a blossoming golden corruption. 

His stomach feels cold. It’s phantom; his body is still working enough to keep the trace of gold inside him warm. 

“I dreamed,” he says at last and then stops. 

How to explain the dream. How to explain that he’d woken with a silent scream cracking his body open and the memory of gold that had poured from his mouth. 

He’d been waking in the dream too. Stumbling from his bed to his bathroom, alone in the cold morning light. Silver, he remembers that, the room had been silvered by the morning sun through his curtains. Cold and comforting, and he’d turned on the bathroom light and looked in the mirror and his mouth had been living gold. 

He remembers wet, warm gold. His lips, his gilded tongue. Reaching up with numb, terrified fingers to touch and that it had spilled over his teeth. A rising gorge of gold, spilling down his chin and over his fingers- 

“Shit,” he manages and turns his face into the pillows. He can barely breathe. 

There’s sharp rustling from the other end of the line, Porter’s indrawn breath - Mat recognizes it, intimate and familiar and not for him - and then a quiet voice is breaking through that. 

“Qui c'est?” 

“Hugo,” Porter mumbles, voice suddenly distant from the phone. He sounds so distracted. “Go back to bed, it’s fine.” 

He’s with Hugo. Mat isn’t surprised. He’d known, has known for a long time but… he hadn’t thought. 

He hadn’t had the chance to think, had acted on impulse and reached for someone that isn’t his to reach for anymore. 

He hauls in a breath that he doesn’t feel and closes his eyes against the exhaustion. 

“Sorry, I’m fine,” he mumbles and he knows Porter knows it isn’t true, just like he knows that if he doesn’t leave an opening then Porter won’t force one. Won’t make him talk about it. Will let him go. “Gonna… Yeah, gonna go back to bed. Sorry. G’night.” 

“Mat,” Porter begins but he sounds tired, muzzy and slurring. It aches like an old wound. 

“Goodnight,” Mat repeats and it’s sharp. Unfairly sharp. 

“...Goodnight,” Porter replies and Mat hangs up on him.

\--

“It’s a weird curse,” Dillon says, off-hand. Mat jumps a little, startled.

It’s the late afternoon and they’ve been here for an hour and a half already. The sunlight spilling through the window is turning fiery and red. Dillon is turning a pen over and over in his hands, unconscious and rhythmic. It might have bothered Mat but he’s sleepy with how long he’s been here, in the quiet and the golden sun. 

Sometimes Dillon breaks the quiet to ask a question. Sometimes he’ll spend a few moments muttering arcane shit Mat doesn’t bother to catch and then stare into space for minutes at a time, blank and unblinking. His face looks strange so still; Mat hardly knows him but he already knows everything about Dillon is animated at all times. 

“Any changes in symptoms?” he asks first and when Mat tells him there aren’t he moves on, rapid-fire, “Do you have magic of your own?” 

It’s probably a topical question, probably not even rude. Mat doesn’t even hesitate before shrugging, shaking his head. He’s years and miles from the last time he’d cared that he’s null as fuck. There’s nothing wrong with him. Nothing to do with not having magic, at least. 

Dillon hadn’t really responded to it, anyway. Just nodded and moved on. 

“How is it weird?” Mat asks, belated. The drowsy boredom is making him slow, dropping his guard. 

Dillon blinks, the blankness receding from his gaze a little. There’s curiosity there, warm and concerned. A little bit of annoyance, unfocused, nothing to do with Mat. He’s looking in Mat’s direction but Mat doesn’t think he’s seeing him, not really. 

“Usually there’s like,” Dillon pauses, a hand coming up languidly to sketch a nonsense shape in the air. “A sense,” he settles on, “of why a curse is laid, y’know? Anger or fear or whatever. Hate. That kinda shit.” 

His bit of a California slur is heavier and his eyelids are drooping a little. He looks sleepy, displeased with whatever’s going on. 

“Yeah?” Mat prompts. Dillon reaches up to rub at his face and when he looks back his gaze is clearer. There’s a gleam of- of _something_ in the depths of his eyes and then he’s smiling wryly and he’s himself again. 

“I’m getting nothing this time,” he explains and shrugs. “I’d expect… not to freak you out, but some heavy hatred or anger for such a huge curse. But there’s like no emotional tag at all to this magic.” 

He pauses and Mat digests that. He doesn’t know what to do with the knowledge at all. 

“Doesn’t change much,” Dillon continues at last. His smile is unconcerned and it’s that more than anything that calms the tickle of fear rising sneakily in Mat’s chest. “Just weird.”

\--

Porter’s called him back and he hasn’t picked up much. Once to say he’s busy in the studio, because he had been. Once to apologize tersely, stumbling through the words he doesn’t want to say. He’s sorry for calling him in the middle of the night, sorry for being so rude.

He avoids Hugo’s name. Porter doesn’t want it in his mouth, not like that. 

It lingers on his tongue anyway. Bitter, an acrid flavor, and he can’t hate Hugo for giving Porter what he didn’t have to give

He wishes he could hate. He wishes he were a fraction more petty, a little more selfish. He wants to hate. He wants to be angry. 

All he feels is tired and kind of achey.

\--

Dillon still hasn’t mentioned the record player, hasn’t caught Mat’s restless glances at it. He’s been too busy paging through Mat’s paperwork, asking him questions.

There’s books open on the desk, thick hardbound tomes Mat doesn’t know why he didn’t expect. There’s just something so strange about Dillon like this; a scruffy tattooed SoCal bro Mat would expect to see against the bar at one of his shittier shows, but he’s holding a medical textbook thicker than Mat’s record collection like it’s natural to him. 

He’s frowning down at the pages and gesturing arcane shit in the air. Probably runes. Mat doesn’t know, magic is nothing to do with him. 

He only knows that he can feel the tide of Dillon’s magic tugging at him, pulling at the cells of his muscle and bone. Testing them playfully. It reminds him of a tuning fork, a tone thrumming through him that isn’t native. Just a few frequencies off from what it should be. 

Dillon blinks, half-smiles, reaches out at to pinch something Mat can’t see and _tugs_. The mint taste that’s been washing across his tongue for twenty minutes shifts, abruptly sweet and almost coffee-like. 

“Thanks,” he blurts, startled into speech. 

Dillon winks and then his hand is sketching through the air again and the tide is back in his bones, washing through him, and Mat tilts his head back to stare up at the ceiling.

\--

Mat comes to in what isn't his own entry hall.

He’s face-first in a pile of shoes, back snug to the wall. His body hurts and his chest is heavy and it takes him a moment to push back the wave of panic. The air is struggling in his lungs and he can taste the cigarettes he must have caved to last night on his lips. 

He doesn't put it together for a moment and then he shifts and the hangover spills over him like a waterfall. Its familiar. Sickening, vertigo and he thinks he might still be a little drunk. His head hurts, dull and aching. 

He pushes himself upright. One of his shoes is a few feet away, resting on its side against the wall and he can kind of remember getting angry with it last night, yanking it off his foot and throwing it. Ben and Eric had been there, had laughed at him. Mat’s last memory is Eric turning away to stumble further down the hall. 

No one is with him now. He must have passed out before even getting his other shoe off. 

He kicks it free and gets himself to his feet, swaying against the nauseating tide of his hangover. He has to put his hand on the wall to stay upright, working his way down the hall at a hobble. His whole body hurts, sticky with spilled cocktails and dried sweat. 

He passes through the living room and Eric’s passed out on the couch, Ben laid out on the ground beside it. He’s snoring, wet and ugly, and Mat laughs and then clutches at the bridge of his nose with the pain of it. 

It’s still dark, he discovers dizzily when he makes it to the kitchen, must be the earliest part of the morning. The sky is a wash of blues, greying out off to the east. He watches it blankly as his cup fills and then overflows, freezing water spilling over his fingers. 

He hisses and clumsily turns the faucet off. Staggers his way back out of the kitchen sipping his water. Passes through the living room and doesn’t bother trying to stay quiet when he gets Ben’s bedroom door open and his water deposited on the bedside table. 

There are clothes all over the floor. Eric’s and Ben’s and some of Mat’s, clothes he can remember buying but hasn’t seen in a while. He hasn’t been around much, lately. 

There’s a pipe on the bedside table and Mat contemplates taking a hit before the vertigo surges again and he slides down to huddle in the blankets instead. It’s cold in the empty sheets but it’s warmer than the hallway had been and in the darkness, the smell of another human thick around him, it's easier to drowse down and down into sleep. 

He wakes to a body crawling into bed with him, a hot hand finding his arm in the blackness under the blankets. A squirming body settling next to him, and he goes lax to accept them closer by instinct, a hand splaying over his chest and a cold nose finding the swell of his shoulder. 

“P-,” he gets out, and then he’s awake enough to remember and the hollowness in his chest throbs, once. 

The room is lavender with the light of early morning. The sun trickles in through the partially drawn curtains and in a few hours it’ll be too much but for now it’s not the worst thing for the dry burn of his eyes. 

“G’back to sleep,” Ben murmurs in the intimate space between them and Mat closes his eyes and fades away again.

\--

He leaves Ben sleeping, shuffles his feet back into his shoes and steals a jacket from the pile by the door. He spends a moment watching Eric sleeping on the couch, wondering lazily if he should wake him.

He leaves it eventually. Shuts the door behind him quietly and sticks his hands in his pockets, makes his way slowly down the street. He doesn’t really have anywhere to be, but he doesn’t really want to stick around. 

Maybe he should go home. He has an appointment with Dillon tomorrow.


	2. Chapter 2

Dillon’s frowning when he comes out of the first weird trance of this appointment and Mat’s still antsy enough to notice, not soothed by the warmth or the boredom or the soft music from the record player. 

_Put something on,_ Dillon had told him, laughing, when he’d finally noticed Mat’s sneaky looks at the record player. _Whatever you want, they’re all my favorites._

They have different music taste, he and Dillon, but not by too much. 

“Something wrong?” he demands and Dillon shakes his head, muzzy. 

“Uh, honestly no,” he says, lilting exhausted slur. “Just more weird shit.” 

He looks kind of tired. There are dark circles under his eyes, but they’d been there before Mat had gotten here. There’s something about his gaze that’s still so far away, in a different world. He’s not looking at Mat. Not really. His eyes are vacant and cold. Distant, reflecting light that isn’t warm enough to be the sun through the windows. 

“Are you supposed to swear this fucking much?” Mat jokes weakly and Dillon grins, gaze warming a little as it focuses on Mat. 

“Fuck,” he parrots, all savvy California roundness in the syllables. “Yeah, yeah, it’s my customer service that keep the clients.” 

There’s still a faint crease between his eyebrows. 

“Weird shit?” Mat prompts and Dillon sighs, thumbs at an eye for a moment and shrugs. 

“It’s older than I would expect, is all,” he says. “It’s been dormant for a while it looks like, can’t tell how long just yet. But a year or so, uh… At least that. A long time.” 

Mat doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t know what to say. 

He feels… cold. 

The room is warm but Mat can feel the cold setting into his bones, aching and terrifying. Choking him silent, the cold spreading out from his stomach into his lungs, freezing his breath, freezing everything. He can’t move because if he does he’ll shatter, he’ll break into a thousand impossible pieces.

He imagines, hysterically, Dillon sifting through his remains for gold. Panning his corpse like a river and wresting fingernail-sized glittering pieces from him. 

A warm hand lands on his arm and he flinches. 

Dillon is watching him but he doesn’t say anything. Just waits until Mat gets his breath back and the record runs out, a light grip on his upper arm. Mat closes his eyes and lets the sun try to warm him and forces himself to breathe.

\--

He’s wandering the back rooms of a venue he almost recognizes.

The halls are cavernous, huge. Echoing around him. The techs pass him, one after another, faceless and gone before they can resolve into someone he might know. The air is so cold it aches in his fingertips. 

He knows this place. He just can’t remember how. 

There’s music playing somewhere. Pounding and jubilant and distant, and there must be a crowd out there. There must be someone playing, and he wonders if he’s meant to play soon. 

He knows the way to the stage. Knows the way to the backdoors. There’s a pack of cigarettes in his pocket, there always is, but he turns down a different hallway. He knows where the green room is too. 

Porter’s waiting for him and he’s golden. 

He’s a perfect statue except, impossibly, in motion. 

Mat watches him move around the room as a perfect version of himself, shining golden all over. Perfect golden curls falling in his eyes. He doesn’t breathe, Mat can’t see his chest move. He smiles at something on his phone and his mouth is gold, his teeth are gold, his blank eyes are golden and staring and Mat realizes he’s about to vomit only a moment before the bile rises in the back of his throat. 

Porter laughs and it sounds like metal shrieking against metal, it sounds nothing like him, it sounds _horrifying_ and Mat’s on his knees gagging on vomit that won’t come when a hand catches his shoulder. 

“I can fix it,” Dillon tells him earnestly. 

Mat wakes up with a noiseless sob and dry cheeks. Rolls over and curls up tight under his blankets, eyes screwed shut. His hands are fists so tight they hurt but he can’t make them unfurl, can only press them to his chest and try to stop the hyperventilation. It mostly works. 

He imagines calling Porter. He’s coming back into town, had asked cautiously to hang out. It might be the reason for this dream, he thinks dizzily, and throws the thought away. The _whys_ are useless. 

He thinks for a moment of calling Dillon. He could… he could ask if this is a symptom. He could make Dillon talk to him, he’s learned Dillon loves to talk. It could be grounding. 

He doesn’t know where his phone is. He curls up even tighter instead and waits.

\--

Mat shouldn’t be this drunk, waiting for Porter to come over for lunch, but he hasn’t been able to get himself up off the couch except for the siren song of alcohol.

“Did you know we're running out of coffee?” he asks and Porter pauses in taking his coat off, the door still hanging open behind him. 

He’s in the same room as Mat for the first time in- fuck, it’s been months. It’s not the first time he’s seen Porter since Porter had sat him down, told him it wasn’t working, told him he didn’t feel the same anymore, but somehow this… it feels like it. 

He shouldn’t be doing this now. He should be trying to keep it together. It’s just, someone’s cursed him to turn into gold and his chest is aching like it’s started in on his heart already. 

Porter’s face shutters. It must be something about his tone, Mat thinks with dizzy hysteria. He can't hear himself over the rush of his pulse in his ears, doesn't know if his voice is coming out too loud or if he's shaking or if he even managed words at all. If he'd just cried out, because panic is jangling down his nerves and he's barely keeping himself together. 

“I can go get some,” Porter hazards and he's still hovering in the doorway. Mat laughs and he blinks a little, eyebrows drawing together. His gaze flickers over the neat little pyramid of cans at Mat’s feet. _It's okay,_ Mat wants to say. _I'm okay._

“No, I mean,” Mat says instead and his arm flies out, a motion he doesn't understand and doubts Porter does either. “We, the world. Humanity. We're consuming faster than we produce, right? We're gonna... We're gonna run out.” 

Porter steps into the room, cautious. Deerlike, ready to bolt. 

“What, are you just looking up facts?” he asks and it's a joke but his tone is all wrong, too cautious. “Why?” 

“Maybe I should quit producing,” Mat continues and Porter really freezes this time. A statue with sleepy, impossible eyes. Surveying Mat, and there's something about his expression that Mat feels in his chest though he doesn't understand it. 

Mat feels frozen. Trapped in the warm amber of the afternoon sunlight, syrupy and drowning, tasting of honey and the beer he's been drinking for hours. Trapped at the other end of this impossible breakdown. 

He's been breaking down in slow, awful motion for months. Maybe years. Maybe his whole life, he thinks and then gags on the pretension of it. 

“Do you want to?” Porter asks eventually and the world begins to move again. 

“I don't know,” Mat breathes out and then shakes himself, thumbs at an aching eye socket. He's exhausted and the sleep deprivation is clouding over his skin in prickly waves. “No.” 

He wants…

He lifts the can on the couch beside him to his lips but it's empty. He drops it over the side of the couch and knocks over the entire stack. Porter watches it happen and then settles gingerly at the other end of the couch. He's still watching Mat warily. 

Porter’s scared of _Mat_ bolting, he realizes. 

“I'm okay,” he insists quietly. Porter watches him a moment longer and then reaches out, pulls the laptop from Mat’s nerveless fingers and carefully shuts the lid. Mat doesn't stop him from sliding over, from settling into his side with the same careful deliberate motions. 

It feels good, his body drawn back together by the contact. It doesn’t hurt as badly, like this. He closes his eyes and tucks his hands between his legs.

\--

“They’re dreams,” Mat tells the receiver of his phone.

It’s tucked between his shoulder and his ear, precarious as he drifts around the kitchen. He’s making curry, kind of, more something to do with his hands than anything. He’s too alone today, his roommates gone out somewhere, Ben and Eric doing a show on the East Coast. Jake is somewhere else doing a tour or something, and anyway Mat doesn’t think he can handle that much Jake right now. 

He shrugs his shoulder, resettles the phone against his ear. Reaches for the spices and starts mixing. 

“Dreams?” Dillon’s voice through the speaker, tinny, tone breezy and unconcerned. 

Mat mixes for a moment, a fork sifting the spice mix together. The air is starting to smell of garlic, ginger, curry powder. His stomach is turning. 

“Nightmares,” he admits after a moment. The only sound for a long series of heartbeats is his fork against the glass of the bowl and the soft rush of white noise through his phone. 

“Huh,” Dillon says, and he sounds distracted. 

“Is it a symptom?” Mat prompts and sets the spices aside, reaches for the cutting board. 

Dillon hums, a rush of musical static. 

“Maybe,” he allows after a moment. “Don’t think so, but maybe. It’s probably just stress and shit, it doesn’t have to be magic that’s fucking with your head, you know?” 

Mat snorts. His hands are shaking a little bit as he cuts the stems from the broccoli. 

“Comforting,” he mumbles and Dillon laughs. It’s simple. Carefree. 

“I’m here all week,” he says and Mat’s back straightens with it, tension easing off slow and inevitable. Something about how unconcerned Dillon is. “Don’t worry about it, next appointment I’ll be doing the first unravelings of the curse. Should lessen the intensity of any effects, unless I fuck up, which I won’t.” 

“ _Really_ comforting,” Mat replies but he can kind of breathe again. 

“Fuck off, I have a great bedside manner,” Dillon tells him mildly. “Are you cooking? I’m hearing cooking shit in the background.” 

“Curry,” Mat replies. There’s a smile ticking at the corner of his mouth. It feels kind of nice. “Coconut rice and lamb.” 

Dillon moans, theatrical and obscene through the phone, and Mat snorts, rolls his eyes. 

“Fuck, yeah,” he says, “you’re bringing me a plate of that tomorrow, okay? Doctor’s orders, I’m serious.” 

“Doctor?” Mat needles. 

“I have a doctorate in fuck you,” Dillon retorts and Mat’s smiling now, little and cautious but he hasn’t smiled in- 

It’s been days.

\--

“He’s doing the first unraveling or whatever tomorrow,” Mat tells the air above him.

“That’s good,” Porter hums through the speakerphone. He’s back in Europe. Probably France, but Mat hadn’t asked. He doesn’t really care. 

He hasn’t called to talk to Porter in a week. It felt… nice. 

He supposes it makes sense, that the fact that he's dying is what puts his life in perspective. 

“Yeah,” he agrees, and realizes he doesn’t really have anything else to say to Porter. 

There’s a pause. The rush of international static. The sound of his own breathing. Porter’s breathing down the line. 

“I’m gonna… I’m gonna go make lunch,” he tells Porter and hangs up over Porter’s goodbyes. 

He should probably eat something. He probably won’t.

\--

Dillon smiles at him when Mat shoves the foil-wrapped bowl at him, the instant he walks out his office door. It’s broad and warm and sincere and Mat finds himself smiling back before he can stop himself, has to look down and away until Dillon takes the bowl from his hands.

“Doctor's orders,” he reminds Mat happily and Mat rolls his eyes. He's tense but it eases the way it just seems to when Dillon grins at him like that. 

“This isn't going to take the curse out entirely,” Dillon warns. “I'm just taking off the first layer, but it should lessen the symptoms and shit.” 

“Yeah, I know, I read the fucking pamphlet,” Mat needles back, rolls his eyes again when Dillon just waggles his eyebrows and goes to set the plate on the desk. 

It's just like every other time, Mat settling a record on the spindle and fitting the needle to the groove. Settling into the couch, still tense and right at the edge. Dillon, sauntering over to sit across from him. Even the questions are the same, questions about his symptoms and then the wash of espresso magic across his tongue. 

Dillon stands, plants his feet and wiggles his fingers at Mat theatrically. Mat snorts despite himself. 

“Ready?” he asks, and when Mat nods, “this won't hurt a bit.”

His eyes slip out of focus before he can see Mat's eyes roll, and then magic is washing into Mat and it feels…

It feels different than the cool flavor of the diagnostic spells, _other_ in a way that the other spells came close to but can't quite reach. Insidious, weaving in from Mat's mouth and nose and fingertips. Threading down through him, curious and gently insistent. 

It doesn't hurt but it isn't pleasant, and Mat's about to shift uncomfortably on the couch when the threads of magic reach his chest and Dillon makes a little confused noise that breaks the musical silence neatly. 

Mat looks up.

Dillon had been grinning and Mat stares at his face, watches the expression melt into a _frown_ and that can’t be right, isn’t right, and then there’s a tugging in Mat’s chest that feels like something coming unlatched- 

 

_-he’s back in the dream and the gold is gushing from his mouth, he can’t close his throat against the flow, it feels like he’s heaving and heaving without end, like he’ll never be able to catch his breath-_

 

_-oh god, Porter’s staring at him with such unfathomably sad eyes and Mat can’t choke out words, he’s frozen and achingly cold, oh god what did he do_ wrong _, why doesn’t Porter_ love- 

 

-he’s jolting forward like he wants to run but his legs won't come under him, his shoe catching on the couch and he’s sliding gracelessly down-

 

_-god, fuck, he’s finally free, he’s flying and powerful and the air against his skin feels like cold gold and champagne-_

 

_-it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it-_

 

-Dillon is staggering away from him, toppling backwards and hitting the floor with a thud that rattles everything in the room. 

It’s graceless, all of his weight at once, absolutely uncontrolled. The drop of someone unconscious before they hit the ground and Mat’s cheek is mashed into cold, grimy industrial carpeting but he can kind of see, now. 

His vision is sparking at the corners in brilliant colorless strobing. His lungs are filling but it feels like there’s not enough air in the room. His whole body is asleep, the sick spreading rush of pins and needles as he writhes slowly. 

He still forces himself up on numb arms. Drags himself across the rough floor to Dillon, paws him over with hands regaining sensation in painful bursts. 

Something in him feels empty, or opened, or scraped clean. Raw. 

He reaches Dillon, a sprawled mess of limbs and inoffensive plaid flannel. His chest is rising and falling, his body unnaturally cool under Mat’s hands as he paws at him, tries to roll him over. It’s hard, his fingers barely work and he doesn’t _understand_ what happened, doesn’t understand what’s happening in his body but he’s scared. 

He’s scared of what he’s done to Dillon. 

He pushes it down, levers Dillon over onto his back and heaves a sobbing breath of relief when Dillon blinks his eyes open. 

He looks so dazed. Glazed and uncomprehending. Unreachable. He lifts a hand to look at, shaky and wavering, and Mat shakes his shoulder, distantly annoyed. He’s trying to check if Dillon’s okay and Dillon’s staring at his own hands like it’s his first time tripping. 

Dillon paws at his face and Mat groans in frustration. He can’t unstick his jaw to speak but noises bubble from him anyway. 

There’s something wrong about the texture of Dillon’s skin against his. It’s so cold and there’s no give to it. It’s so, so cold. 

He catches Dillon’s wrist, pulls his hand back so he can look at it. 

Gold glints at him in the warm sunlight. Rosy, rich and unreal, and-

It’s spreading. Spreading across Dillon’s skin, fingertips frozen and stiff, palm a flat golden imitation of itself. And Dillon’s wrist is firming under his hand, cooling, he can _feel_ the spread of it somehow. It’s a pull in his chest, the tugging tide of gold rushing down through Dillon’s veins. 

“Dill,” he chokes out, half of Dillon’s name slipping between gritted teeth. Bile is rising in the back of his throat because he can feel Dillon’s body cooling, he can feel it, _how can he feel it_. 

“Mat,” Dillon says and his voice is a broken bell. 

It’s a nightmare. It’s a nightmare, and Mat tries to believe it for a moment but the wrist under his hand is cold and firm now and he can feel it, he doesn’t know how but he can feel it. He can feel the gold, the unforgiving firmness of it. 

“You need- Mat, you can pull it back,” Dillon’s gritting out, and Mat knows Dillon must be feeling the winding tendrils of metal wrapping around his veins like a lover, twining around his aorta, laying claim to the delicate capillaries of his lungs. Deadly, he can feel it, he can feel it choking the heat from Dillon’s body. He can feel the pain of it, the ache of the cold, the burning pressure of Dillon’s circulatory system backing up against the golden solidity of his extremities. His body shutting down, and Mat can _feel it_. 

“I,” Mat’s jaw finally unlocks, mouth sliding open, dumb and scared. “What, I don’t know how-,” 

A statue of a hand, batting clumsily at his chest. Cold gold in the shape of fingers thumping against his ribcage. Dillon, reaching out with what he can still control. 

“ _Take the magic back_ ,” Dillon hisses. The gold is threading through his bones now, a blunt wash of metal, in his ribcage and reaching inquisitively for his spine. There’s wild panic in his eyes and for a precious second Mat meets them, absorbs the weight of it. 

This is no nightmare. 

He lets Dillon knock his hand down against Dillon’s chest, against the struggling thunder of Dillon’s heart. He can feel the pulse of it under his palms, more than the physical tide of his blood. He can feel the rolling pulse of Dillon’s magic, the way Dillon is fighting the rotting progression of gold with everything he has, that it isn’t enough. 

He can feel the gold. He can feel it, a cold bluntness against his consciousness, against that scraped-raw part of him he would swear he’s never felt before. 

Dillon’s arm falls away and the chest under his hand convulses. Trying to drag breath into lungs that are crystallizing, heart trying to beat through the first bloom of gold in the muscle. Failing, his body is failing under Mat’s hand. 

Mat reaches out and grabs and _yanks_. 

He pulls, pulls at something he can’t define, something he doesn’t know how to grasp except that it fits under his hands easier than anything but the sliders of his deck. It vibrates in his fingertips, harmonic, almost a melody. 

There’s a jangling note, a discordant tone that shouldn’t be there. A string out of tune. He sinks both hands into the flow of the music, reaches after than tuneless string and pulls and pulls. Pulls in, pulls back, and slowly the threads of what he’s pulling at come free. 

He hasn’t touched a bass in a year, maybe more, but he thinks they’re like guitar strings. Thick, musical metal, woven together. He’s teasing the fabric of it apart, until the thread vibrating in the wrong key catches in his palm. 

He makes a fist, tighter than he’s ever grasped anything, and hauls it free. 

The magic snaps in his hand and abruptly the discordant note is gone. The singing around him is fading back as he realizes what he’s doing, as exhaustion he doesn’t know how to fathom rushes in to takes its place. It sounds right, though, and he realizes as the last note fades phantom from his ears that he was hearing _Dillon_. 

The chest under his hand is rising and falling, fast but easy. Air moving in and out of Dillon’s lungs. The gold has washed back out of him like a tide. Mat can feel that it’s gone, can feel it dim and unclear but distinct enough to know that Dillon’s body is whole again. 

“Mat,” Dillon croaks, voice a ruin. 

Mat staggers to his feet, pins and needles and clumsy dizziness, and takes off running.

\--

No one calls him.

Porter texts him, asks about the appointment. Mat reads it and doesn’t reply. Jake messages him a few hours later, and then texts him again when Mat doesn’t reply, and then doesn’t text again. Ben and Eric don’t text but there’s Twitter notifications telling him they’re still checking up on him. 

Nothing from Dillon. No call, no text, nothing in his email. He doesn’t expect there to be, not really, not after nearly _killing him_ , but he checks anyway. 

It’s only been a day. Mat curls up in the corner of the couch and promises himself he’ll deal with it tomorrow. 

The raw place inside him hasn’t healed over. It still cries out to him, begs for him to pay attention to it. He forces it down.

\--

He falls asleep on the couch. There's no one to tell him not to and the thought of moving is just too much.

He wakes up and spends half an hour staring into space. Thinks about nothing at all, and drags himself into the shower to think about nothing while staring at the porcelain tile instead.   
He heats a plate of curry and poked at it numbly. He manages a bite or two and leaves it on the counter to go cold. 

The doorbell rings as he's settling back into the nest of blankets on the couch. 

He thinks about ignoring it, about curling up and ignoring everything for another day. It would be easy. 

He staggers to his feet. 

He doesn't bother checking through the peephole and so he doesn't have a chance to prepare himself when he opens the door and Dillon's rocking back and forth on Mat's welcome mat. 

Dillon smiles at him. Mat stares. 

“How do you know where I live?” he asks at last.

The shock is setting in, heavy and strange. He doesn’t know what Dillon’s doing here. There’s something wrong with it, with the way Dillon looks so normal soaked in the unflattering hallway lights, baseball cap on backwards like a douchebag, tattoos revealed by the crisp white of his t-shirt. 

“You left your contact information with me, it’s literally in your medical file,” Dillon tells him, teasing and unbothered. Like he should be here. Like this is _normal_. 

“I could call the police on you,” Mat says, tongue numb, working without his conscious input. 

Dillon rolls his eyes, pushes his hands into his pockets. 

“You will not,” he says, amused. It’s a little bit infuriating. 

He’s right and Mat hesitates, shifts from one foot to the other and then shrugs. 

“Come in,” he says, turns away to pad down the hall. Everything is a mess, there’s a bong on the coffee table and a pile of beer cans on the kitchen counter, but it’s easier to ignore than acknowledge. He doesn’t know why Dillon’s here. 

“You don’t have a curse,” Dillon’s voice comes from behind him, calm and as professional as it’s ever been. Mat pauses in the kitchen doorway, doesn’t turn for a long moment. 

“I know,” he says, and he didn’t think he knew before but as he says it he realizes that it’s true. That the raw place inside him is humming to the tune of his nightmares, to the frequency of gold. 

“You said you didn’t have magic,” Dillon continues. He sounds… he sounds kind of amused, somehow. Mat doesn’t know why. Doesn’t know how any of this is funny. He’d nearly _killed_ Dillon. 

“I,” Mat tries to say and his voice fails. He doesn’t know what to say. 

He turns and Dillon’s leaning against the entryway wall, watching him with a little grin and a raised eyebrow and Mat’s heart lurches because he looks so alive. So whole, and every color but gold. 

“I didn’t know I had it,” he manages at last. Dillon nods. 

“Gathered that,” he says. “You need training. I don’t know how you managed to poison yourself with your own magic like that. It’s not really my area, you know, whatever. I break curses. I emailed you some numbers you can call a minute ago.” 

Mat swallows, shrugs and nods. He knows he needs help. 

He doesn’t ever fucking want to do what he did to Dillon again. Not ever, not to anyone, not to anything. 

“So why are you here?” he asks. He’s tired, abruptly, but not in the worst way. Like the weight of something has been taken from him. “Couldn’t you, I don’t know, _call me_?” 

“Oh yeah, I could have,” Dillon agrees placidly. He’s starting to grin. 

Mat waits for a moment, until it becomes obvious Dillon’s perfectly willing to wait. 

“And?” he prompts at last. 

“Since you’re official no longer my patient, I was going to ask if you wanted to grab a coffee with me sometime,” Dillon says, and he’s definitely grinning now. 

Mat stares at him. It doesn’t process for long minutes, the sentence rolling back and forth in his skull, slippery and impossible to grasp. 

“You what?” he ask at last. His voice comes out strangled. 

“Wanted to ask you out for coffee,” Dillon repeats. He’s still smiling. Mat’s heartbeat doubles up, suddenly way too fast, he can feel heat rushing to his cheeks and he doesn’t- he doesn’t get it, he doesn’t understand-

“I almost killed you,” he croaks. 

“You didn’t mean it,” Dillon replies, mock-serious. When Mat just stares at him, can’t control what his expression is doing, he sighs through his nose and stands up straight again. When he continues, his tone is gentle. “Really, you didn’t mean to. It was an accident.” 

Mat’s jaw clenches. His whole body is going tight, but under it his chest is aching a little and he… 

He thinks about going to coffee with Dillon. Discussing something that isn’t gold and magic, isn’t curses and hatred and the dark heaviness Mat can feel inside himself that has nothing to do with magic at all. Discussing music, arguing over Dillon’s record collection. Maybe getting to touch his tattoos, and it’s been so long but… 

The little stab of curious intrigue goes through him and he reaches up to rub at his mouth. 

“You’re fucking weird,” he manages. 

“Fuck you,” Dillon replies amiably, “you’re one to talk. Noon-ish tomorrow? I know a nice cafe.”


End file.
